“Online document sharing site Scribd has announced that it has partnered with a number of major publishers, including Random House, Simon & Schuster, Workman Publishing Co., Berrett-Koehler, Thomas Nelson, and Manning Publications, to legally offer some of their content to Scribd’s community free of charge. Publishers have begun to add an array of content to Scribd’s library, including full-length novels as well as briefer teaser excerpts.

Offering book excerpts to entice readers is nothing new – Amazon and Google have been doing this for years, and Amazon’s Kindle allows readers to download book samples to their devices for free. But these options aren’t conducive to sharing content that you’ve discovered on the web, as they don’t allow your to embed them in your blogs and websites. Scribd’s iPaper Flash document viewer is built to do exactly this, so inserting a book excerpt into a blog or even an author’s site is easy…

Scribd has actually been posting both full text and excerpts of books from some of these publishers for a few months now as they conducted trial tests. The fact that they’re now publicly endorsing the platform seems to indicate that they’re pleased with the results…”

“Thomas Nelson announced today the launch of NelsonFree, a program that allows readers to receive content in multiple formats—physical book, audiobook and e-book—without making multiple purchases. With NelsonFree, the price of the hardcover book includes both the audio download and the e-book…

Once readers purchase a book with the NelsonFree logo, they are directed to a Web site where they register and answer a security question. They then can download an audio MP3 file and several types of e-book files, including EPub, MobiPocket and PDF…

Nelson president and CEO Michael S. Hyatt said, ‘I believe that the industry is shifting and we, as publishers, need to explore new methods of getting our content into the hands of customers…NelsonFree will give readers a new level of value and flexibility. It will enhance their literary experience and allow greater employment of the content without breaking the bank.'”

Amazon’s Kindle Store – The biggest range and some of the best prices.

Google Books – Will add in a link when they open a store. Pretty sure this isn’t going to get cut from Google’s arsenal as it’s potentially a huge revenue generator.

FeedBooks.com – This is a serious contender and a website/software solution that aims to be the universal ereading platform that’s compatible with every mobile device. My take is they’re trying to be the Microsoft of the eReader business and turn the various reading devices into IBM. They were founded in 2007.

Waterstones – Although Waterstones sell Sony’s Reader they have their owneBook store, with books in ePub format.

Zoomii.com – I really don’t see the point – apparently it took 1.5+ years to code and it does look good. However, it’s not really offering anything other than visual UI improvements. I do think there’s a market for the creator to sell the technology for various niches.

eHarlequin.com – Not my area of speciality so I’m not going to write much. I do love some of the titles though.

Publishing Related Websites

Lulu.com – A really good website focused on self-publishing. If you’re going to self-publish a book or are considering it, definitely visit this site. And they have laser focus on their purpose and direction – helping creators publish their work. They support 7 languages, and now have 1.3 million registered members from 80+ countries. Lulu.com is definitely a great publishing website for the author side.

Authonomy from Harper Collins aims to flush out the best writing talent. They look remarkably similar to what I had in mind with a self published author rankings site. Actually, if there’s one site on this list that you must check out – it’s Authonomy.

BookSurge – An Amazon owned company (acquired in 2005) and provides a valuable service i.e. publishing books on demand.

SmashWords.com – Probably #2 after Authonomy on the must check out list. I intended to do a full post on them, and will. A really good idea and a good site. If they discovered that there are other colors in the color spectrum besides white and blue their website would look even better. Also, their founder/CEO’s interview is a must-read. He really gets it.

MagCloud – Wow. A site to create on demand magazines. This is probably #3 on the must check-out list, and one of the prettiest sites.

Document Sharing Websites

Scribd.com – This website is a huge hit, and their latest innovation iPaper, which lets you view any document online, is becoming a huge hit – iPaper is to documents what flash is to movies. They seem to be drawing a lot of negative comments – However, I’m very impressed by iPaper and by the service they’re providing i.e. letting you share documents easily with friends and/or strangers.

ISSUU – I like their user interface more than scribe – especially the search pages. Totally clueless on how popular they are, and how long they’ve been in the market.

Software + Mobile Software

Sophie – Waiting till Oct 15th, 2009 is going to be hard – this looks to be a huge positive step for publishing and especially self publishing.

FBReader is an ereader software that works on most mobile devices. Its open source and supports more formats than I knew existed.

Calibre is an eBook library management application written by Kovid Goyal. It’s free, open source, and cross platform.

Adobe’s Digital Editions – I don’t fully understand it, and all I can tell is that it might be very impressive if it does all that is promised.

GoSpoken – The website behind Vodafone Books on Mobile. they’ve signed up a lot of major UK publishers for this straight to cell phone audio book service.

Books Related Websites

DailyLit – I’ve written about them before, and they’re a good site and they seem to be expanding their offerings and adding more features.

KindleFeeder – A feed aggregation service for the Kindle that I’m surprised Amazon hasn’t shut down yet. It looks to be pretty useful.

BookArmy – Getting a lot of buzz even though it hasn’t opened yet.

bkkeepr.com – I don’t know what to say. I’m tempted to offer them one of my domain names so they stop self sabotaging themselves with a ridiculously hard to remember domain name. The service is really interesting and I’m going to try it out for a bit and let you know how it goes…’

There is an interesting webcast from O’Reilly I would draw attention to here:

What Publishers Need to Know about Digitization
Presented by Liza Daly

No prior experience with digitization is assumed in this friendly and accessible overview of the conversion process. We’ll start from the beginning: what’s XML and do you need it? What’s the cost-benefit analysis versus PDF or other formats? From there we’ll tell you what you need to look for in selecting a vendor and how to watch out for hidden costs. We’ll tackle issues of control and lock-in versus cost savings: should you partner with Google, Amazon, or a centralized platform, or go on your own? Finally, we’ll brainstorm some ideas on how to monetize your digital offerings, from opening up your backlist to syndicating content on the Web.